RULES OF THE GAMES

3. Should a ball be driven into the
water of the Eden at the high hole, or into the sea at the first hole,
the ball or, if it cannot be recovered, another ball shall be teed a
club length in front of either river or sea near the spot where it
entered, under the penalty of one stroke.

Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Rules, 1892

The rules of golf evolved from early efforts to organize the game. In
1744, Scottish golfers formed the Honourable Company of Edinburgh
Golfers, the first of its kind in the British Isles. The Honourable
Company developed a set of thirteen rules to govern play on the club's
five-hole golf course at Leith. In 1754, the St. Andrews Society of
Golfers was established, and in 1834 it received its charter and became
the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. The Royal and Ancient,
as it came to be called, adopted the thirteen rules devised by the
Edinburgh Golfers and made additions of its own, becoming in the process
the ultimate arbiter of the game across the British Isles. In 1858, the
Royal and Ancient stipulated that eighteen holes should constitute a
complete course, and in 1893 it decreed that the golf hole should be
four and one-half inches in diameter. These standards soon became
universal. By 1890, there were 387 golf clubs in Britain playing on 140
courses, and the development and refinement of local applications of the
rules at each course had become a fine art.

Books of golf rules and printed material illustrating the rules
became important representations of the character of the game. As with
published histories of golf, some of these works presented
straightforward recitals of regulations and applications, while others
took advantage of the complexity and supposed antiquity of the rules to
offer a more lighthearted appraisal of their meaning.

Golf

W. T. Linskill

London: George Bell, 1892

K. G., & D’A. North Again: Golfing This Time, according to the Badminton Library

William Ralston

London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton Kent, [

Rules

Swinley Forest Golf Club

Reading, England: Bradley, [1910?]

Origines Golfianae: The Birth of Golf and Its Early Childhood as Revealed in a Chance-Discovered Manuscript from a Scottish Monastery

Arthur V. Taylor, editor

Woodstock, Vermont: Elm Tree Press, 1912

Includes the author’s two-page brochure “To All Readers of this Book.”